Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

215 quotes in 1984 categories

• Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
• If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
• Genius is talent exercised with courage.
• The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.
• A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
• One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common…
• Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest…
• 'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the…
• What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
• Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.
• There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.
• An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.
• Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
• We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.
• In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.
• Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but,…
• Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
• You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common…
• One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the…
• A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.

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